Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Tuesday morning at the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference started with another keynote session. This time, Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO of Dell, Inc., presented. Over the past nine years, he feels "the line between business and IT is going away." Michael claims that "Dell is no longer a PC company", and instead is focusing on data center solutions and services to be more like IBM.

John Fowler, Executive VP for Oracle Hardware, claims that Oracle has a single team for hardware development. The SPARC-T4 is their newest chip, with 8 cores and 64 dynamic threads, running at 3.0 GHz. It has on-chip 10GbE ethernet, PCIe, DDR3 Memory controllers and Crypto features. For storage, Oracle now offers four different offerings:

• Exadata (as Database storage)
• ZFS Storage Array (NAS)
• Pillar Axiom (block-level I/O)
• StorageTek tape

Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, indicated that the new Oracle Linux kernel allows for zero downtime patches, meaning that you can update the OS while applications are running without a reboot. The OracleVM (based on open-source XEN) supports both x86 and SPARC-based server hosts. On x86, it can run Linux, Solaris and Windows guests. On SPARC, it can run Linux and Solaris guests.

John Loaiza, Oracle Senior VP, explained the Exadata. It has 168 disk drives and 56 PCIe Flash Cards, connected via 40Gbps Infiniband. The Exadata keeps all data on spinning disk, with "warm data" cached on Flash, and "hot data" cached on DRAM. This is similar to IBM's Easy Tier feature on the DS8000, SVC and Storwize V7000.

Brad Cameron, Senior Director, explained Exalogic, which pre-dates Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The idea was to build an x86 machine for running Java applications on Oracle WebLogic. The Exalogic can connect via Infiniband to an Exadata to access database information, and to 10GbE ethernet for the rest of the servers and clients. Whether you get the quarter, half or full-rack system, you get 40TB of NAS storage.

Ganesh Ramamurthy, Oracle VP of Hardware Engineering, presented the SPARC Supercluster. This combines the storage cells from Exadata, the compute nodes from Exalogic, shared NAS storage using ZFS file system, and Solaris 11 with OracleVM. Taking a cue from IBM's zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, Oracle is offering centralized management for all the layers in their SPARC Supercluster stack. The SPARC Supercluster is intended as general purpose machine, and can be used to run non-Oracle applications like SAP. From a storage perspective, he claims that the storage in the SPARC Supercluster is 2.5x better than EMC VMAX, which basically puts it comparable to IBM XIV pricing.

For my readers in San Francisco attending Oracle OpenWorld, here are some sessions that IBM is featuring on Wednesday. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

Data Management Best Practices for Oracle Applications

10/05/11, 9:30 a.m. -- 10:00 a.m., Solution Spotlight, Booth #1111 Moscone South
Presenters: Vineet Goel, Technical Product Manager, Infosphere Optim - Siebel; Dhan Patel, Technical Product Manager, Infosphere Optim - eBusiness Suite

Oracle RAC and Cloud: Tips from IBM Global Business Services

10/05/11, 10:00 a.m. -- 11:00 a.m., OpenWorld session #15733
Presenters: David Simpson, IBM; Nalin Sahoo, Oracle
In this session, gain valuable insight into high-availability systems leveraging Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC). Hear best practices and lessons learned with these Oracle technologies as well as how IBM utilizes cloud infrastructure with Oracle Clusterware and server pools.

In the Heat of the Oracle Fusion Decision-Making Process: What's Your Next Move?

10/05/11, 10:00 a.m. -- 11:00 a.m., OpenWorld session #9423
Presenter: Esther Parker, IBM
This session discusses how companies can embrace Oracle Fusion so they can meet their business objectives today and in the future.

technorati tags: IBM, Oracle, John Fowler, Exadata, Exalogic, SPARC, SPARC-T4, Supercluster, Easy+Tier